*BSD News Article 57749


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
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From: daniel@icon.pp.se (Daniel Eriksson)
Subject: NetBSD on stand alone 040-card?
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Organization: Me organized, ha!
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Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1995 22:14:24 GMT
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I've been asked to verify the possibility to "port" NetBSD to a 68040-based
data-acquisition card/computer that a friend is planning. The computer-side
of the card is to be kept simple and will at first consist of a 040 (or
040EC), a 68360, 2MB PROM, 16MB RAM, a NCR SCSI-chip (5380/5390 or similar)
and an Ethernet-chip (don't know brand or model, but certainly something
"standard"). This will be linked to the data-acquisition part of the card
(a TI C40-family DSP) through a clever and fast mem-mapped cache of some
sort. I'm no HW-specialist, but this is what I can remember from the
presentation I received.

How much work would it involve to "port" NetBSD to run diskless on a card
like this (forget SCSI and 68360)? Could the kernel easily be loaded from
PROM and then continue booting from a network (a FreeBSD- or Linux-machine)?

Could this be done by someone that knows next to nothing about MMU-
programming? Is the source-code easy to grasp and self explanatory?

Thanks in advance!

--
Daniel Eriksson, daniel@icon.pp.se